Christian theology is theology forged in the realm of the Gospel. The service of the gospel is the point of theology. Thus, if the context and end of theology is found in the reality of the gospel and the shape it takes in the world, what then must theology be? Most, if not all Christian theologians would agree that the point of theology is to serve the gospel as it is proclaimed and embodied in the world. However, the wide range of possible interpretations of the gospel issue in a plethora of theologies, all of which have their genesis in the redeeming logos of God in Christ, but which are spoken in the multifaceted logoi of creation in all their diversity.

It is commonly said that the gospel does not change, but the method of its proclamation and the implications of its message should be adapted to any given cultural or historical location. In contrast, I want to argue that it belongs to the very character of the gospel itself to change, to speak in different inflections, subtleties, and rhythms. Robert Jenson makes this point best when he states that,

It is in fidelity to its own character that the gospel changes. The story about Jesus is gospel because it is the key to our stories, the liberating interpretation of the fears and commitments of its hearers. But then the story about Jesus is accurately told only if it is so told as in fact to incorporate our stories, to be about our fears and commitments. (Story and Promise, 10)

The reason that the gospel changes in every different context of proclamation (and thus the reason that there are many different theologies), is because of the very character of the gospel as a promise. The gospel promises that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the final word from God about how the entire project of creation will turn out. All acts of human promise-making, all commitments and vows which we enter into are always-already conditioned and demarcated beforehand by the reality of death. Death is the end of our promises, our commitments, and our relationships. Thus, for there to be a truly unconditional promise, a hope that is truly transcendent, it must lie on the other side of death. In short, the only possibility of an unconditional promise, yielding in unfettered hope would be a promise made on the basis of – and indeed precisely through – death and resurrection. And this is precisely what the gospel of Christ declares.

Now, this bears upon theology and the diversity of theologies precisely in that because the gospel is the unconditional promise that the resurrection of Christ, rather than our deaths will be the outcome of the world, all human ways of living and being in the world are addressed by the gospel. The gospel is the key to the stories of all people, in all cultures everywhere. Thus, the message about Jesus that is preached changes in accordance with its Pentecostal plenitude. The gospel is at once Christologically specific and pneumatologically universal. Through the innumerable logoi of all created tongues and cultures, the transcendent logos of the Triune God speaks, and in speaking it does not suppress the radical difference that lies at the heart of humanity, but rather, unites all such strands of diverse humanity “to gather into one all the dispersed children of God” (Jn. 12:52).

The Christological particularity of the gospel is mediated through a Pentecostal universality in which the self-same gospel, the story of God’s once-for-all self-giving in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ is told in a multitude of tongues. However, the gospel is always and everywhere the promise of the Triune God, that Jesus’ story is the key to all human stories. That the outcome of Jesus’ life in resurrection is the outcome of all human stories. Thus, in a culture of oppression and systemic injustice, such as that out of which Gustavo Gutiérrez writes in his A Theology of Liberation, it is absolutely essential that the gospel message be preached as God’s liberation of the oppressed people for new life in a community of shalom. This is what the gospel must mean in such a context if its character as the promise that Jesus resurrection is the outcome of all human stories is to be true.

So, if it is cogent, as I have argued, that theology takes it shape from the reality of the gospel of God, which is the promise that Jesus’ resurrection, rather than death and non-being will be the outcome of the human enterprise, it follows that the responsibility of the theologian is to discover how best to articulate the reality of that unconditional promise in the midst of the multitude of human cultural contexts. The task of theology is to faithfully show how the story of Jesus Christ incorporates, critiques, and offers hope to the national-cultural context the theologian inhabits.  This inevitably involves offering hope, and offering critique.  The fact that the resurrection of Jesus, rather than death will be the outcome of the world is not particularly good news from the standpoint of the American imperium.  The gospel confronts as well as consummates when it enters into the world of politics and culture.  The promise that Jesus’ resurrection is the final word about created reality is simultaneously a guarantee that America’s culture of violence and fear has been robbed of its power and sovereignty. 

To do theology in this way is to underwrite a distinctly Trinitarian approach to theological method. Theology begins and ends in the service of the gospel promise, the logos spoken to humanity as Christ, crucified and raised from the grave. Theology exists to bring the logos of God into the idiom of the logoi of culture. Thus, theology is at once Christocentrically particular, and Pentecostally universal. The logos of God is transcendent precisely in that the reality of God’s Triune transcendence consists in pure noncompetitive relationality. The unique Word of God which is Christ is spoken by Christ’s adopted brothers and sisters in the various and sundry words of creation without ceasing to be the transencent Word of God. Indeed, if the incarnation is truly the revelation of the Triune nature, then it is precisely in and through the diversity of the created logoi that the logos of God is most truly revealed.  There is no competition between the divine Word from above, and the creaturely response of receptive doxology (the Marian fiat), and simultaneous songs of proclamatory joy.  It is through the “flesh” of the enflamed tongues of Pentecost that the gospel, the promise of God’s salvation in and through and as Christ’s death and resurrection, is proclaimed throughout the world.  Through Christ and the Spirit, the Triune logos and the created logoi enter into a perfect realm of noncompetitive polyphonic harmony.  In the proclamation of the gospel, the Triune persons recapitulate the event of Babel, transforming the dividedness of the world into the occasion of the pneumatic and christic union as one body with many members.

The theologian’s task is to join in the chorus of Pentecostal tongues, and to show through word and deed how it truly is that the story of Christ’s death and resurrection is the true end and outcome of all human life.  This is what it means to do theology in service of the promise of the gospel, to go forth into every cultural context, and proclaim through the Spirit the depths of the riches of Christ’s drama. To show in every situation how the story of the gospel weaves our stories, and endlessly and dischordantly broken as they are, into the grand story of Christ’s death and resurrection. To be a theologian is to live in the service of this Triune promise.